|
dkirschner's Legends of Runeterra (PC)
|
| [September 19, 2022 02:17:30 PM]
|
Officially retiring this. I started a long time ago and never really got into it until recently. However, I've discovered it's a massive grind. A fun CCG, but also a massive grind. I've stayed in the single-player area, which involves a map with various regions. Each region has a handful of adventures that are rated at different "star" levels (1-star, 1.5-stars, etc.). Your goal is to unlock and level up the game's champions to tackle harder and harder adventures.
There are so many champions! I unlocked four (of maybe 20? 30?), leveled one up to level 12 (out of 30), another to 8, another to 5, and had managed to win all the available adventures through 2 stars. I don't know how much time this took. Early runs at 1 or 1.5 stars could take 15-30 minutes. The 2-star runs were taking about 75 minutes. Runs involve a series of battles. You choose your champion and your adventure, and get the champion's premade deck. Cards in the deck have various special items equipped, which boost their abilities, depending on your champion level. So with any given champion, you begin with the same cards, although they are modified for your champion's level. Once in the adventure, you choose nodes along a winding and branching path. Nodes contain battles, item shops, chests, healers, or other types of encounters. There is a lot of strategy and planning. Your battles will be against different NPCs with different decks who have different relics equipped. You can see some of this information ahead of time, and generally can see a node ahead of you, although there's usually not much you can do given the information. You could choose the battle with the relic that seems easier to handle, choose to get healed instead of buy items if you have no gold, etc. So there is a healthy amount of crossing your fingers, although over time I did start to learn the types of decks I was facing.
Anyway. That sounds so complicated writing it out. And there's so much more. There are TONS of card mechanics to deal with. Even playing as long as I did, sometimes the games would get so complicated with so much shit going on and abilities and equipment stacked, that I would get very lost. In fact, the last game that I did lose was like that, against some magic fairy wizard character who kept summoning these 5/4 (power/health) cards and getting Spellshield (blocks spell effects targeting the card) and Overwhelm (excess damage against an enemy card hits the nexus, which as in League of Legends, is your health pool) on them. Then the adventure mod gave enemies +2 power every time they attacked, so these protected 5/4 cards grew until I couldn't block them anymore. She was also slinging 0- and 1-cost spells around like there was no tomorrow. It was brutal!
Before this loss, I had been realizing that the single-player mode is just playing these same adventures over and over and over, grinding the 25-some-odd champions, grinding your "legend level" (which is a meta-level that awards bonuses across champions in all adventures), and grinding quests to get cards, shards, and the zillion things you need to unlock characters, level up characters, craft cards, and so on. Plus--oooh, Riot you are so mean!--you constantly get experience for quests and rewards that can only be obtained if you pay real money. It shows you progress on these quests alongside the others so you see how much other stuff you could be getting. There is no end in sight!
I initially compared this to Hearthstone, but it seems much more complex of a game, which is cool. However, I played Hearthstone from the time it started, so I watched it become more complex as it evolved. I jumped into Legends of Runeterra after it had been around for years. I can't imagine what it would be like to jump into Hearthstone after half a decade. Just thinking about this makes me nervous for the other card games in my backlog, like Gwent or Slay the Spire, that have been around a minute. I did enjoy my time with this, and perhaps I'll load it up again in the future, but the time would be better spent on the backlog!
add a comment 
|
|
|
 |
dkirschner's Legends of Runeterra (PC)
|
|
Current Status: Stopped playing - Got Bored
GameLog started on: Sunday 11 July, 2021
GameLog closed on: Monday 19 September, 2022 |
 |
| other GameLogs for this Game |
|
This is the only GameLog for Legends of Runeterra. |
|
